ose him it shall be my
own fault," and she proudly relied on a love that would have given me
her life had I asked for it,--in fact she often told me that if I left
her she would kill herself. I have heard her praise the custom of Indian
widows who burn themselves upon their husband's grave. "In India that is
a distinction reserved for the higher classes," she said, "and is very
little understood by Europeans, who are incapable of understanding the
grandeur of the privilege; you must admit, however, that on the dead
level of our modern customs aristocracy can rise to greatness only
through unparalleled devotions. How can I prove to the middle classes
that the blood in my veins is not the same as theirs, unless I show them
that I can die as they cannot? Women of no birth can have diamonds and
satins and horses--even coats-of-arms, which ought to be sacred to us,
for any one can buy a name. But to love, with our heads up, in defiance
of law; to die for the idol we have chosen, with the sheets of our bed
for a shroud; to lay earth and heaven at his feet, robbing the Almighty
of his right to make a god, and never to betray that man, never, never,
even for virtue's sake,--for, to refuse him anything in the name of
duty is to devote ourselves to something that is not _he_, and let that
something be a man or an idea, it is betrayal all the same,--these
are heights to which common women cannot attain; they know but two
matter-of-fact ways; the great high-road of virtue, or the muddy path of
the courtesan."

Pride, you see, was her instrument; she flattered all vanities by
deifying them. She put me so high that she might live at my feet;
in fact, the seductions of her spirit were literally expressed by an
attitude of subserviency and her complete submission. In what words
shall I describe those first six months when I was lost in enervating
enjoyments, in the meshes of a love fertile in pleasures and knowing how
to vary them with a cleverness learned by long experience, yet hiding
that knowledge beneath the transports of passion. These pleasures, the
sudden revelation of the poetry of the senses, constitute the powerful
tie which binds young men to women older than they. It is the chain of
the galley-slave; it leaves an ineffaceable brand upon the soul, filling
it with disgust for pure and innocent love decked with flowers only,
which serves no alcohol in curiously chased cups inlaid with jewels and
sparkling with unquenchable fi